Many people claim that, but no Lisp compiler or interpreter beyond toy level actually uses it as such: It doesn't provide a lot of the syntactic information com

Many people claim that, but no Lisp compiler or interpreter beyond toy level actually uses it as such: It doesn't provide a lot of the syntactic information compilers need. However, Lisp code as AST is an excellent abstraction for macros, so that's what macros manipulate.